The World Always Was Flat
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
The bill was essentially a bargain. It provided an amnesty to those who had already entered the country illegally while stopping others from coming in. But in practice, of course, it wasn't that simple.

Read more about the bill that billed itself as the bill to end all immigration bills.


A guerrilla firing an American gun in El Salvador (1989).

(Don't) Give Me Your Huddled Masses
SIRS Decades

At what point must a country of immigrants shut its doors?

That seemed to be a pressing question at both the turn of this century and the one before it.

But whereas the immigration debate is reported in mostly civil terms in today's press, it engendered all kinds of disparaging and insulting language in the op-ed pieces and editorial cartoons of the early 1900s. You'll find several examples inside SIRS Decades.

In the early 20th century, Americans who opposed the government's immigration policies often expressed that opposition in language that we would now regard as highly offensive.

For example, in a book review headlined "Social Deterioration of the United States from the Stream of Backward Immigrants," the reviewer warns against letting too many immigrants into the country on the grounds that they are typically "used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor" and are "ignorant of underclothing [and] newspapers."

Quoting approvingly from Professor Edward Alsworth Ross's 1914 book The Old World in the New, the reviewer also tells us that immigrants by their mere presence "lower the general plane of intelligence." And he accuses immigration supporters of combining "facile lip-sympathy for immigrants" with "heartless indifference" to the poor Americans who suffer from the consequences of immigration.

The following cartoons, published in 1891 and 1904 respectively, make similar points. Both suggest that the United States -- through a combination of naivety and general goodheartedness -- is admitting foreigners who will bring with them anarchism, criminality, insanity, pauperism, and other social ills.

     1891 anti-immigration cartoon... ...and 1904.

Activity: Read the entire 1914 book review, then 1) identify the main arguments advanced against open, or liberal, immigration policies; 2) using these same arguments, write a short op-ed (opinion) piece that could be published in a mainstream newspaper today.